city, were a glorified and joyous plaything for the visiting scholar or poet from the isle of safety. "Dulce mari magno." Ever since, in the Winter that followed Waterloo, the flocks of "Milords Inglesi " came in their private chariots to possess the Piazzi di Spagna, after their twenty years of war-exile from Italian joys-ever since that date, now a century old, we English have moved about in Italy and Rome in a privileged position. For we alone have been citizens of a State in no fear of being conquered by an insolent foe, persons free from the heavy burden of the race-feuds and military despotisms of the Continent, safe in our inviolate isle. We watched with too little understanding the convulsions of all Europe in 1848; we pitied the agony of France in 1870, but never feared her fate for ourselves; even the long struggle for Italian freedom with all its sufferings and postponements, though it moved our sympathy, was a thing remote from our own experience. And so we have always trodden the historic streets of Rome, where liberties and empires so often rose and fell, as persons detached from the cruelties, sacrifices, and catastrophes of its history ancient and modern, observing all with the snug pleasure of an art-critic before a masterpiece.

And now, behold, these ancient tragedies and agonies are become flesh and blood to us. We, too, strive for our lives

and our liberty against the Tedeschi, sworn to enslave us. Our far-flung empire is in danger as was once that of Rome. Divisions or want of forethought now would ruin us, as Italy was ruined when Landsknecht and Spaniard sacked this city near 400 years ago. And so, as we move about among the present inhabitants of Rome, amid a people that has risen to its dangerous duty at this crisis of European freedom in a mood so sober and with preparations so well made, we English feel heart-brothers with them, sharers at last in the agonies and sacrifices and dangers which their fathers knew so well as their daily portion. We are blood-brothers with Europe now. "Sink or swim, survive or perish," we are in for it together now. That this change will profoundly alter our character I cannot doubt. Whether mostly for good or mostly for bad, it is far too early even to guess.

Meanwhile the Italians are watching, with friendly but penetrating eyes, to see how we drag ourselves out of the dangers among which we have fallen. They have heard that the Englishman is best when he has his back to the wall. They are watching, and they think the munitions campaign and the loan a good beginning. They are waiting to see if England also is capable of a Risorgimento on a mightier scale of organized effort than that which sufficed to free Italy two generations ago.

HE great news of General Botha's superbly successful and glorious campaign has been in all men's mouths this week. The King, the Commons, and the War Office, and the self-governing dominions have expressed to him the congratulations of the empire, to which he has added a large and valuable colony. The writer has had several opportunities of visiting what was then German Southwest Africa, and a few details as to its past, present, and future will suffice to show the extreme importance of the conquest effected.

The history of the territory in question, which extends roughly from the Orange River mouth to Portuguese West Africa, along the west coast of the African Continent, and about 250 miles inland, dates further back than that of most Southern African territories.

To this day, on the hill southwest of Luederitzbucht, there is uplifted a cross, presently composed of steel, and a replica of the cross erected by Bartholomew Diaz in 1486, when he first circumnavigated the Cape of Storms.

The original was removed by the order of the German Emperor, and is now believed to be in the Museum of Historical Research in Berlin. The hill in question was known until 1908 as Diaz Point, but since the discovery of diamonds in this part of the territory, the point and the hill behind it have been renamed Diamond Hill.

From the time of its first sighting by Diaz the bay behind the point, called until the time of the German occupation, Angra Pequena, (the Narrow Harbor,) remained a port of call for stray vessels traveling to and from the Dutch East Indies, and especially so after the settle

ment of the Dutch East India Company had been established at the Cape of Good Hope.

From time to time, and more particularly during the early and middle nineteenth century, whalers also made use of this part of the coast, but the inhospitable nature of the country discouraged all and sundry from even attempting to penetrate into the interior, as well as from settling near the harbor itself. In order to complete the historical survey, it is only necessary to add that the country was taken possession of by the British Government, and the Government of the Cape Colony carried on the immediate administration. Toward the latter part of the nineteenth century, by agreement between the Imperial and Colonial Governments, the territory was abandoned, and it was immediately seized by Germany, which country had previously claimed it, as having been acquired for Germany by one Anton Luederitz, a German trader and hunter. From that date until its surrender to General Botha's victorious army it has been a German colony, and for the last few years the largest, most prosperous, and best administered, and the one with the greatest prospects of becoming not only a self-supporting, but a remunerative part of the German colonial empire.

The country was originally abandoned by the British chiefly by reason of the fact that it seemed wholly unproductive, utterly barren, and without any promise for the future. And, indeed, the aspect to the visitor from either East or West is appalling enough. Coming from the east, the only means of entry is across the Kalahari Desert, through trackless, waterless country, swept by sand storms, and repellent from every point of view. From the west the approach is by sea.

Coming from Cape Town, you find a belt of barren, shifting sand dunes stretching inland for miles and miles. There is not a sign of life, human, animal or vegetable. Dense fogs and storms abound, and the Benguela current increases the dangers of navigation. The only safe port in the middle of the nineteenth century was Walfish Bay, then, and since, a British possession, but now rapidly silting up. The port of Angra Pequena is a small, almost entirely landlocked harbor, into which ships of great draught cannot enter. For ships of a somewhat shallower draught it has been made available by the work done since the German occupation. The only other port is Swakopmund, immediately north of Walfish Bay, an open roadstead exposed to the full fury of the gales and seas coming across the Atlantic from South America. Since the abandonment of the territory and the German occupation it has, however, been found that, once the forbidding outer defences have been passed the country itself is found to be most suitable to many forms of activity, and is likely, owing to its magnificent climate, to be able to support a large white population.

In the south the revolution has come in the discovery of diamonds in 1908 in a form never known before in the history of the world's precious stones. Certain natives working on the railway line then being constructed from Luederitzbucht inland found among the gravel and sea-sand stones which they knew, from previous experience in the diamond mines of Kimberley, and in the river-diggings of the Western Orange River Colony, to be diamonds of an exceptionally fine quality.

In 1906, after the temporary prosperity due to the money expended by the German Government during the Herero campaigns in 1904, Luederitzbucht was bank

rupt. In 1910 it was a large and flourishing town to which settlers had flocked from all parts of the earth, and north and south of which for scores of miles there extended an unbroken chain of diamond fields, practically from the Orange to Walfish Bay. The export from these fields, all alluvial sand, in 1913 exceeded the value of £1,250,000. From August, 1908, to about February, 1910, life in Luederitzbucht was almost a replica of the days of the American goldfields in the '40s, and many stirring and quaint stories can be related in connection therewith.

The first large company was formed in Cape Town and is a British company. It was this company which paid £100,000 for its claims, and put active work as well as capital into the mines that made the fields. When it was successful, the German Government immediately stepped in, and the German Emperor decreed that no further foreign company should be allowed to own diamond claims in German Southwest Africa. After the war, under British rule, there should be great opportunities for the development of this important industry, as a very large section of the ground has been worked by or for the German Government and another large section has been entirely closed to private enterprise.

In the north very valuable copper deposits have been found at Otavi, the terminus of one of the two branch arms of the railway running northeast from Swakopmund toward the Caprivi enclave. They are being worked under the auspices of a Johannesburg mining firm. Other valuable mineral deposits have been reported from time to time, and there seems to be no doubt that great mineral possibilities lie hidden in the interior, which is very largely, from the prospector's point of view, a terra incognita.